Hotlinking is a term that refers to the inclusion of images on a particular site by using direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and a person creates website B and wishes to add a few images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they may simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in two basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be good to go. You do not need any programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some point, you can see all of the Internet sites that are protected inside the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your real images. You'll only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If required, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is as simple - go back to the same section, check the box beside the particular Internet site and then click on the Delete button.